May 19, 2009

Alexander
Pereira, current GM of Zurich Opera, will be the new Intendant of the Salzburg Festival -- he's been chosen a few hours ago by the board of directors. Other candidates for the job were director of Amsterdam Opera Pierre Audi and current Scala GM Stéphane Lissner.

As we reported yesterday, a computer glitch -- the menus for next year's shows were left open in the official Scala website -- had revealed the full extent of la Scala's season one week before the season is to be revelaed to the public in the yearly ceremony/press event; unsurprisingly, the glitch has now been fixed, and the menus are closed -- you can only reach November 2009 now.

ABT Honorary Chairwoman & First Lady, Michelle Obama, was wooed by the American Ballet Theatre's 2009 Opening Night Gala, and was in attendance last night to take in a sampler of season highlights performed by ABT principals and a guest appearance by Herbie Hancock.

The 69th Annual Gala was held at the Metropolitan Opera House, where the ballet company performs their 8-week season.

If you can't wait one full week for Teatro alla Scala to announce their 2009/10 season (which they'll do Tuesday, May 26), you can find details via a website glitch that makes the roster accessible online.

Carmen (to open the season conducted by Barenboim, then later by Dudamel)RigolettoDon GiovanniFrom the House of the Dead (conducted by Salonen)Tannhäuser (conducted by Mehta)Lulu (conducted by Gatti)Simon Boccanegra (conducted by Domingo)Das Rheingold (conducted by Barenboim)FaustIl Barbiere di Siviglia (with Florez)L'occasione fa il ladro L'elisir d'amoreOnegin

Special events are monopolized by The Dominger: a Gala for Placido Domingo, and the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program of Washington.

Jeffrey D. Vanderveen, managing director of Universal Music Classical Artists Management, asked by Opera Chic to comment on the increasingly insistent voices alleging that Anna Netrebko was pregnant with her second child, just told Opera Chic:

On hand to sing at the opening festivities at the All England Lawn Tennis Club was OC's favorite pOpera tart, Katherine Jenkins. The crossover star showed-up in an electric pink lace sun dress and jeweled flip flops, and sang in duet with fellow crossover singer Faryl Smith -- who at 13-years-old stands a few inches taller than the 29-year-old Jenkins. Sucks for Jenkins! She should have borrowed a pair of platform flip-flops from Britney Spears along with that dress.

~Click on the magic link below for tons more pictures of Jenky from the event + Faryl + back-fat ~

Plácidone puts on the prosthetics again for Théâtre du Châtelet's forthcoming production of Franco Alfano's Cyrano de Bergerac. He's singing the title role with soprano Nathalie Manfrino as Roxane and Saimir Pirgu as Xtian. Patrick Fournillier conducts with Mise en scène by Petrika Ionesco.

Opera Chic caught The Dominger's excellent February 2008 Scala Cyrano (also with Fournillier, 'tho in the Zambello production...and with top-form Sondra Radvanovsky as Roxane), and was touched by his compassionate and dedicated performance so much that she couldn't get her Dior mascara stains off of her vintage Hermes handkerchief. We're certain he won't disappoint in Paris.

In cinema -- and in opera -- one of the things that matters to most, to Opera Chic, is that artists shouldn't really talk down to their audience -- they should assume a modicum of intelligence on the viewer's, and the listener's, part. Just a tiny bit of it.

Someone who has never tried to sell bootleg goods to his audience is Terry Gilliam: A man who, by assuming he's not dealing with utter morons, gave us films such as the intensely weird "Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas", the deeply unsettling "Brazil", the badly misunderstood "Tideland", the darkly gleeful "12 Monkeys", the strangely moving "The Adventures of Baron Munchahusen" (not to mention, of course, Monty Python). All from a man that in a sheer, and rare, moment of complete brilliance had been chosen two years ago by la Scala to direct Andrea Chenier and eventually the deal fell apart, as Opera Chic warned her readers quite some time before the press reported on it -- and Gilliam spoke to the Times about his new film, to be introduced at Cannes. It's also Heath Ledger's final film, as the young Australian actor died of an accidental overdose in January 2008, only completing about half of his scenes for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Actors Johnny Depp,
Jude Law and Colin Farrell stepped in after Ledger's death to portray the character in
the remaining dream sequences.

They try to lower the
standard as much as they can to reach what they think is this great dumb
audience. And I have always resisted that and wanted to believe in the
audience’s intelligence. But if you keep feeding people baby food for long
enough they begin to like it.

First you hear that, yeah, it's not just those who are the closest to Anna Netrebko who never stopped hearing about how much she had loved being pregnant with Tiago (her baby boy born in September 2008, his daddy is Anna's partner Erwin Schrott: the three of them in the photo below are gracefully posing right in front of the store of one of Anna's big corporate sponsors) and that she was thinking of having another baby sometime in a not so distant future. (And the diva herself gushed to the public about how wonderful pregnancy was.

Then you hear that the Met might have already been alerted, confidentially, that Anna might, just might, not be available this coming December.

One couldn't help notice, meanwhile, that the latest pictures of Anna in Zurich from two weeks ago showed the glowing soprano covering her stomach in quite a few shots. We wonder if a rightfully proud new daddy hadn't been overheard gushing the news to his colleagues.

Opéra national de Paris's current production of Janacek's The Makropoulos Affair features a set inspired by the 1933 film, King Kong, with Angela Denoke's Emilia Marty channeling Fay Wray. All thanks to Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski. Photo credit, Christian Leiber.

May 15, 2009

The 2009 Classical BRIT Awards were held earlier tonight at London's Royal Albert Hall in an appalling display of bad hair; for the first time in her long life, Camilla wins for the best coiffure (at least unlike Jonas Kaufmann's, her hair looked freshly shampooed).

The tenth annual ceremony handed out awards to a handful of randomness, in addition to Gustavo Dudamel for "Male Artist of the Year", Sir Charles Mackerras for the "Critics' Award", and José Carreras scored himself a "Lifetime Achievement In Music". The full list can be found here.

Chiarot's name -- over which Rome's Mayor, Regione Lazio and Provincia di Roma governing bodies have found an agreement -- should be officially announced as new GM tomorrow.

Stay tuned then for the possible announcement of Riccardo Muti as the new Principal Guest Conductor of Opera di Roma with two or three operas to be conducted by him in Rome every season (he will almost certainly not accept the title of Music Director, though).

It started as an accident. The small Herend rabbit had fallen into
Claire's purse. It had been on the piano and she had been gathering up
the sheet music at the end of the lesson when she knocked it off. It
fell off the doily (a doily! on the Steinway!) and into her large
leather bag. What had happened after that was perplexing, even to her.
Locket had been staring down at the keyboard and hadn't noticed. And
then, Claire had just . . . left. It wasn't until she was downstairs
and waiting for the bus that she grasped what she had done. And then it
had been too late. She went home and buried the expensive porcelain
figurine under her sweaters.

May 13, 2009

Opera Chic has a weakness for Michael Tilson Thomas, a great American conductor, one of our greatest really, a man who, if anything, is underappreciated -- he is one of our foremost musicians. And the sad thing is that, all things equal, if he were European and more aloof -- or even a bit of a douche -- many Americans would probably appreciate him more.

There are book clubs. Why not symphony clubs? I think the major
performing organizations will have to look at the expansion of their
roles in educating people, in leading the process, in creating new
partnerships...

...When an audience goes to see a play by Shakespeare, what
percentage can follow it line by line? Not many. They can hear the
famous lines. A good deal they pick up form the production, the way it
is done. Maybe we’re going to see some kind of change in the musical
fashion of performing. We’re in a bells and whistles age. We’re in a
world of video, and some musicians treat it the way some silent movie
stars treated talkies — it’s just a fad. It is important that musicians
get inside of this, rather than have it forced on them.

Even a staunch Anglophile like Opera Chic could not avoid to shudder a little this morning reading how Liz Forgan, chairwoman of Arts Council England (the body that dispenses public money to the arts in the UK), keynote speaker at the Royal Philharmonic Awards, thinks music should be taught in schools.

I mean, the UK historically made caning in public schools an impressively kinky part of their otherwise splendid educational system, but to add aural abuse to the list of indignities those scared schoolchildren have to suffer at school seems to be a bit much.

"Give
them Birtwistle, Buxtehude, Ligeti, Ockeghem and Beethoven as soon as
possible. Give them the best of contemporary music of all sorts. Don't apologise."

"Throwing children alive into a boiling vat of great music does them no harm at all"

Opera Chic's advice for your children: piano (or some other instrument) lessons are generally fun, when appreciated: and let them sort out of your music collection the stuff they like (if indeed they do like it). Otherwise, your kids are better off watching the Muppets -- Beethoven was a fan of theirs, after all.

Franco Zeffirelli's staging of Pagliacci @ Opera di Roma, already seen in Florence and Moscow in the past, impresses because, for once, the conservative director has decided to update an opera, shifting the action of Leoncavallo's blockbuster to the early 1960s. Gianluigi Gelmetti conducts. The cast of the production, as it is often the case at Opera di Roma, is quite crowded throughout the run (eight shows, total): Nedda will be played by Myrtò Papatanasiu, Susanna Branchini and Mina Yamazaki, Canio by Stuart Neill and Renzo Zulian; Tonio by Seng-Hyoun Ko and Silvio Zanon.

Stuart Neill was last seen at la Scala this past Dec 7 as Giuseppe Filianoti's last-minute replacement in Don Carlo (photo below).